Wonderful Life

☆ Highlight anything that you have learned through this course and discuss why this is meaningful for your learning and instruction?


      I have learned many meaningful strategies and background knowledge of teaching reading. At first I had felt that the amount of text are too hard to cover. But now I feel that if I didn't cover the whole book, it would be impossible and might take so much time to read the book by myself. Among those meaningful things, I can choose 3 things as follow.

      First, I learned exactly about  knowledge of teaching second language reading. I had already known some skills and background knowldege of it through many courses for last few years. But, through this class I learned more deelply and exactly. For example, I didn't know exactly about the difference between cognitive skills and metacognitive skills. But now I know that the main difference is consciousness and intention.

     Second, the presentations from classmates are worth learning because they are creative as well as useful in real teaching. They were great opportunities to apply the concepts of teaching reading in the textbook to the real situation. And other classmates creative lesson plan or materials are also helpful to think about the teaching procedure and results. For instance, I showed pictures that are related with the words in reading text in the textbook, and made students to guess the word meaning and spelling. In that way, I noticed that students felt more comfortable and active towards word learning.

     Third,  I could apply many reading skills in my teaching practice in April. It was hard for me to teach reading text with various activities  to middle school students. But, I remembered the reading skills that I had learned in this course, and tried to apply them. For example, I tried to provide students with many materials before I started the class. I showed video clips which showed the topic-related interesting videos and made students think about the words in them. And I also tried to ask questions before I taught the reading text and tried to have students infer the meaning of text by themselves in advanced classes. After the teaching practice and came back to the course in May, I realized that I had missed many meaningful skills even though I tried hard at that time. That is, I learned more teaching reading skills in this course from May. I could realize that there were missing points in my teaching practice. For example, I forgot providing more reading materials for extensive reading. And I noticed that I focused more on the intensive reading to move quickly to the next steps. And I also noticed that I have to learn and practice more to make my class and teaching skills more natural and meaningful. That is more natural and logical flow is needed by using appropriate skills that I learned in this class.

    The advantage of this class is that the contents of this course are overlapped with other courses. In fact, I can understand better the contents of 'Teaching Young learners' 'Teaching Listening' because some contents are overlapped or similar. So it was very helpful for me to establish schemata related with Teachers' Exam.  In addition, I will put them in practice when I become an English teacher.